Economist Steve Horwitz: The idea that prices are knowledge surrogates. Prices aren't mere numbers--they are [a] form of communication that goes beyond language and math. Without them, we are blind and deaf in figuring out how to make choices and allocate resources. It is the price system that enables us to be as rational as we are and is a key part of what McCloskey calls "The Great Betterment."

Don Boudreaux’s candidate: “The fact that even something as ordinary to us moderns as a familiar commercial-grade pencil requires the creativity of thousands of people and the work effort of hundreds of million others - all spread out across time and space - yet an American in 2016 can purchase a pencil for about ten cents (a small fraction of an ordinary American worker's hourly wage). And what is true for a pencil is true, in an even greater magnitude of 'wowness,' for nearly everything else that we moderns regularly consume.”

Adam Smith’s point about the importance of largemarkets to the division of labour – “to choice, both in goods and in types of employment (career paths) we choose, and so, ultimately, to civilisation.”

There is no free stuff from government.

Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand? i.e., by seeking our own gain, in a market system, we help others

All men’s impulses, when motivated by legitimate self-interest, fall into a harmonious social pattern.

What economics can best teach philosophers and everyone else (and what Bastiat can still teach economists) is that other human beings need neither be a burden nor a threat, neither a hell nor a horror, but a blessing.

This is the greatest lesson economics can teach: that in a society making peaceful cooperation possible we each gain from the existence of others.

1 comment:

yes... I agree price as the most important economic idea. price is a form of communication.... throw in the idea of supply/demand.... and I think I understand the most important parts of economics.. :)

Which makes one wonder about the contrived nature of interest rates.

I've always accepted Hayeks view that interest rates is a "price"... and therefore "communicates".What it communicates is the information needed to balance consumption, savings and investment..Malinvestment is the result of contrived interest rates..??

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